71. Simon & Garfunkel - Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (1966)

1. Scarborough Fair/Canticle
2. Patterns
3. Cloudy
4. Homeward Bound
5. Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine
6. 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)
7. Dangling Conversation
8. Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall
9. Simple Desultory Philippic (Or How I Was Robert MacNamara'd Into Submission)
10. For Emily Whenever I May Find Her
11. Poem On The Underground Wall
12. 7 O'clock News/Silent Night

A perfect album as the weather begins to turn chilly and cloudy (go figure). That is, once it makes up its mind. Damned weather, it's about as reliable as the French. Especially if you take all their petrol and pensions!

Anyhow, this is the first we hear from the glorious soothing voices of Simon and Garfunkel, especially Simon because Garfunkel was kind of the '60s equivalent to apl.de.ap from the Black Eyed Peas, in that it was widely agreed that he had too stupid of a name for anyone to give a shit about his work outside the band (Can you hear that? It's the sound of Filipinos boycotting my blog!). Wonderful harmonies abound here.

Unfortunately, this album is a lot like Aftermath, in that it's got a smattering of classics amongst a regrettable amount of songs that just aren't as good. It's not like I'm being haunted by the Spectre of Filler again, but I can feel his icy breath on my neck as I write this. No, it's not that bad, but I just can't bring myself to care about songs like 'Cloudy', they just seem so slight.

There are a good number of triumphs here, however. 'Scarborough Fair/Canticle' is an arresting take on the folk classic, intertwined with anti-war lyrics that manage to stay far short of preachy and overwrought. Combine this with the intricate guitar and harpsichord and you've got yourself a Sawng.

The other great songs manage to conjure an autumnal sense of wistfulness that permeates across the whole album. 'Homeward Bound' and '59th St Bridge Song' both succeed in those terms. They make me feel...well, groovy. Or as groovy as it is possible to feel without the aid of psychedelics.

There's some weirdo songs on this album too! 'Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine' is supposed to be a satire on advertising, but 'A Simple Desultory Philippic' is a hilarious send up of Bob Dylan's folk rock style.  The music sounds like a low budget version of 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' while Simon complains about things like 'I've been Ayn Randed, nearly branded a communist 'cause I'm left handed," It's a hard song to take seriously, but this is such an over the top parody for the usually serious group that its humor is its strength.

The final song, a mixture of Silent Night and a news broadcast, is really quite the downer ending. Listening to the reports remind you of just how insane and chaotic the '60s must've seemed. It's fascinating from a historical mindset.

This album, while it may have its fair share of forgettable songs, the good songs kick so much ass you'll forget the rest of them even existed. 8/10

70. The Rolling Stones - Aftermath (1966)

1. Paint it Black
2. Stupid Girl
3. Lady Jane
4. Under My Thumb
5. Doncha Bother Me
6. Think
7. Flight 505
8. High And Dry
9. It's Not Easy
10. I Am Waiting
11. Goin' Home

Oh, it's these guys again!

In the two years since their last album here, the Stones have gone through quite a bit of change. On their first album, Jagger and Richards only managed one complete song, and even that song was a bit of a Beatles ripoff. And now, for the very first time, the Stones have an album where they wrote every song all by themselves. They grow up so fast...

And they is grown, too. These songs are a far cry from the derivative blues covers and generic rockers of the early '60s. They've got a bunch of kooky instruments thrown into the mix, even a dulcimer! Did the Beatles ever use a dulcimer? Hell no. SUCK IT FAB FOUR!

The album starts off great with 'Paint It Black', a song that everybody in the entire world loves. The mysterious sitar part, Mick Jagger's melodramatic-as-shit vocals, the pounding drums and the meandering bassline...this song's got it all! It furthers the sitar's then-burgeoning status as the hippest new instrument in the rock set, despite the fact that almost none of them knew how to play the instrument properly.

The next series of songs I have always found very amusingly placed. First you have 'Stupid Girl' whose lyrics are misogynist and sniping and perfectly suited for the Rolling Stones. Then you have 'Lady Jane', which is an honest to God psuedo-Elizabethan ballad, complete with dulcimer and 'I pledge my troth to Lady Jane' and all sorts of pansy-ass bullshit (good song, though!). Then, as if you weren't confused enough, the next song is 'Under My Thumb', where set to a catchy marimba shuffle, Mick Jagger finally discovers the most surefire way to attract women: compare them to pets. It really gets stuck in your head though!A surefire way to set back women's lib: catchy songs.

The rest of the songs range from fairly good to not so great. Unfortunately, the record suffers from the overstuffed first side, as there's nothing all that memorable on the second half. 'Think' has some pretty cool fuzz guitar, and 'I Am Waiting' actually has decent sounding harmonies for a band that couldn't really do harmonies (not yet at least). And though I suppose 'Goin' Home' was fairly progressive at the time, being an 11 minute blues song, but it really doesn't need to be 11 minutes at all. It seems more like they just forgot to turn off the tape instead of the freaked-out blues jam I was expecting. There's just not enough to hold my interest. And I really, really wish Mick Jagger would shut up. 7.5/10

69. The Mothers of Invention - Freak Out! (1966)

1. Hungry Freaks Daddy
2. I Ain't Got No Heart
3. Who Are The Brain Police
4. Go Cry On Somebody Else's Shoulder
5. Motherly Love
6. How Could I Be Such A Fool
7. Wowie Zowie
8. You Didn't Try To Call Me
9. Any Way The Wind Blows
10. I'm Not Satisfied
11. You're Probably Wondering Why I'm Here
12. Trouble Every Day
13. Help I'm A Rock
14. It Can't Happen Here
15. Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet

Listening to this album within the context of this list, I can more fully appreciate just how incredibly bizarre this album is. I can't imagine what your average record buyer in 1966 would've possibly thought as he put on this thing. Hell, even I wasn't sure what was going on when I heard it 40 years later.

What really endears this album to me is the sheer audacity of the whole thing. For one, he released it as a double album in an era when double albums were still very rare. I think the album ended up costing around $30,000 or something. On an album that clearly has very little commercial potential, especially in 1966. And this was his debut album! How on earth did he get away with this?

Another thing that strikes me is how sudden and upfront this record is. Most of the time (and especially in this era), bands develop their sound and image over their first few albums. Not so here. Zappa emerges from the womb fully formed, complete with goatee. The strange instrumentation, the random spoken asides, and the mocking of pop culture are all here from the start, and they would follow Frank for his entire career.


But enough waffling, on to the album! It's another concept album, with a bit more focus than the Kinks' earlier effort: It's a satirical observation of American pop culture, either directly attacked in sneering protest songs or mocked in bizarre pastiches of brain-dead pop music. Songs like 'Go Cry on Somebody Else's Shoulder' are hilarious in their sheer banality. It's like '50s doo wop as sung by aliens or something. 'Wowie Zowie' is even better, taking the most puerile lyrics and setting them to an incredibly poppy xylophone-flavored arrangement. The liner notes make some comment about this song being designed to attract the 12 year old market or something, and it totally works in a completely hilarious way. Zappa, you clever bastard, you.


The harder edged songs are really something as well. 'Hungry Freaks, Daddy' is one of the more blistering countercultural attacks on mainstream society, along with a rockin' kazoo part (in fact, there are kazoos all over this album! It certainly suits it, I think). 'Trouble Every Day' is even better, a sort of Dylan-esque diatribe against the media's handling of events like the Watts Riot that inspired the song. It's a fairly standard blues rock number and surprisingly the most 'normal' sounding song of the whole album.


This album gets weird in the last third, though. 'Help I'm A Rock' is this weird sort of repetitive groove that has like 10 voices speaking some insane wall of gibberish, and it just gets weirder from there. 'It Can't Happen Here' is like if a barbershop quartet took a shitload of drugs, and all of this culminates in the 12 minute slice of madness that is 'The Return of the Son of Monster Magnet'. Interesting stuff, but it starts to drag on after a while. It wouldn't take too long for everyone else to get on the psychedelic freakout train, though.


While I wouldn't say it's his greatest album, it's always been one of my favorites, and it's one of the few records that remains brilliantly baffling to this day. 10/10

68. Paul Revere and the Raiders - Midnight Ride (1966)

1. Kicks
2. There's Always Tomorrow
3. Little Girl in the 4th Row
4. Ballad of a Useless Man
5. I'm Not Your Stepping Stone
6. There She Goes
7. All I Really Need Is You
8. Get It On
9. Louie, Go Home
10. Take a Look at Yourself
11. Melody for an Unknown Girl

In which Paul Revere comes back from the dead and finally realizes his ambition to form a rock group. But before he could produce his magnum opus concept album about the heroic struggles of the Revolutionary War (and even some of the non-heroic ones for good measure. I love a good tarring and feathering!) he had to cut his teeth in the rough and tumble world of bland pop albums.

And that's exactly what we have here. While the Mamas and the Papas got by on their neat arrangements, these guys don't even have that. I mean, these guys were basically one of those dime-a-dozen pop groups littering the musical landscape back then, like the Dave Clark 5 and Strawberry Alarm Clock and the Fuck Buttons (Ok, maybe not the last one). When you get such a band to record an album, it usually doesn't turn out that well! Musically, this album might as well be from '64 in terms of their sound.

Of course, there are some rather good songs on this record. The big hit, 'Kicks', is notable for being an anti-drug song that doesn't annoy me with overly moralistic anvil-dropping. Not only is it a catchy tune with a Byrds-y guitar riff, the lyrics aren't too preachy! Although songs like this would get washed under the tidal wave of psychedelia, it is at least interesting.

Also, 'I'm Not Your Stepping Stone', later covered by the Monkees and for some reason, a bunch of punk bands, is surprisingly a fairly hard rocker. The vocals get downright gritty! 'Louie, Go Home' is also fairly interesting, with faster/slower sections.

I can take or leave the rest of these songs, though. They're all fairly indistinguished early Beatles-esque tunes. The only songs that truly make my bile rise are the ballads. I could scarcely hear any of the singing in 'Little Girl in the 4th Row' over the comparatively mighty sound of my yawning. And 'Melody for an Unknown Girl' is nothing short of an attack on my poor sensibilities, consisting of an incredibly ham-fisted spoken word intro that begins to repeat itself as the song fades out, reminding you of the endless torment of hell. After this, a saxophone solo that reminds me uncannily of Kenny G a full 20 years before he began vomiting his dentist's waiting room bilge onto the unsuspecting American public in a way that BP would be proud of. It annoyed me so much that I'm going to take even more points off the score, because there's no reason that I should have to endure such a song. 5/10

67. The Mamas and the Papas - If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears (1966)

1. Monday Monday
2. Straight Shooter
3. Got A Feelin'
4. I Call Your Name
5. Do You Wanna Dance
6. Go Where You Wanna Go
7. California Dreamin'
8. Spanish Harlem
9. Somebody Groovy
10. Hey Girl
11. You Baby
12. In Crowd

And now, for the special 'Take a bath, you stinkin' hippies!' edition of my blog, we present the Mamas and the Papas. With a name like that, there was no way they were gonna last very long, but during their 2 years of popularity they managed to get a fair amount of hits. 

'Monday Monday' and 'California Dreamin'' are by far the most well known tracks here, serving as nice morose slices of pop music to dilute the sometimes all-too-sunshiney sound of '60s pop. 

While the 2 big hits are unquestionably the best songs on the album, I was very pleased to find that the album tracks weren't as bad as I thought they were going to be. They're a sort of grab bag of originals and cover songs. 'Do You Wanna Dance?' is surprisingly not danceable at all, but it is much prettier for it. Oh, and 'Straight Shooter' is actually a decent rock song!


Unfortunately, there's not much I can really say about  this album other than that it was better than I expected it to be. When you're faced with such staggering pop albums like Pet Sounds with all its intricate vocal harmonies and instrumentation, you can't help but be left a little cold with something like this. It's a good demonstration of the increasing diversification of pop music in the '60s, but it's not worth choking on a ham sandwich over (by far one of the funnier urban legends in rock's storied history) 7.5/10

66. The Kinks - Face to Face (1966)

1. Party Line
2. Rosie Won't You Please Come Home
3. Dandy
4. Too Much on My Mind
5. Session Man
6. Rainy Day in June
7. House in the Country
8. Holiday in Waikiki
9. Most Exclusive Residence for Sale
10. Fancy
11. Little Miss Queen of Darkness
12. You're Lookin' Fine
13. Sunny Afternoon
14. I'll Remember

The Kinks: one of the few bands that actually truly mattered during the British Invasion. Unfortunately, by the time they began turning into a truly great band, most Americans had already stopped caring. That suited the Kinks just fine, though, because if there's one thing I've noticed about this album, it's actually British. I know, half the damn list is British, but since rock music came from the States, most of their music was trying to emulate the American sound. The Kinks decide 'Sod that!' and went off to write what is called one of the earliest concept albums in rock music. It's a pretty simplistic concept (character sketches of ordinary British people), but it does the trick.


The Kinks certainly have changed quite a bit from their power-chord abusing beginnings. These songs, while they aren't quite the ultra-constructed music of Pet Sounds, have stuff like random sound effects and a surprisingly large amount of harpsichord. Which, by the way, is played by Nicky Hopkins, who appears on quite a lot of these albums, and he even gets a song written about him called 'Session Man', which has to be the first rock song on this list to satirize an aspect of the music industry.


There's a lot of good and witty material on here, as you would expect from a record with song titles like 'Most Exclusive Residence For Sale'. 'Sunny Afternoon', the big hit here, is a wonderful satirical barb at the upper crust of British society (they get brought up a lot on this album. I guess Ray Davies wasn't making as much money as he'd have liked) that totally turns Taxman on its head. 'Dandy' was rather interesting because for years I only knew the Herman's Hermits version, but here we have the original in all its rough-around-the-edges glory.


Basically, the Kinks invented Britpop. Years and years before it actually became popular. While the songs aren't quite as fully realized as they would be within a year or so, this album is a bold step in an exciting new direction. 8/10

65. The Monks - Black Monk Time (1966)

1. Monk Time
2. Shut Up
3. Boys Are Boys And Girls Are Choice
4. Higgle-Dy-Piggle-Dy
5. I Hate You
6. Oh How To Do Now
7. Complication
8. We Do Wie Du
9. Drunken Maria
10. Love Came Tumblin' Down
11. Blast Off
12. That's My Girl

 IT'S MONK TIME!!!!

This album is something else right here. It's another one of those lost classics of the time that would only become influential years and years later, when weirdos like The Fall listened to it. As worn out as this cliche is, this album sounded like nothing else at the time. It's intensely rhythmic, loud, and bizarre in a way that most people besides the Fugs and Frank Zappa couldn't even think of in 1966.

These guys were a group of American army folks stationed in Germany in the mid-60s who decided to form a band. At first they were your stand,ard '60s garage band with the simplistic music and the endless Louie Louie covers, but then they turned into something far, far different. I suppose they figured that since they obviously weren't going to become a massive success in the English-speaking world by playing to Germans, they could experiment as much as they wanted to. The Germans just wanted loud beat music, they weren't going to care about the lyrical content! As a result we get lyrics like 'Why do you kill all those kids in Vietnam!? Mad Viet Cong! My brother died in Vietnam! James Bond, who was he?' screamed in an absolutely manic voice.

The band also chose to experiment musically as well. These guys  have the loudness and the rhythmic attack of the Sonics, but much more proficient in their musicianship. There's a lot of great organ solos on here. Oh, did I mention that one of the members plays a banjo? And every instrument is fuzzed up to maximum potential. The Sonics brought the loud and simplistic playing to punk, but these guys gave it something far more important: an attitude. 9/10